The chance of a bust in the NFL draft

May 1, 2012

With the 2012 NFL draft officially complete, the
fans of every NFL franchise are dissecting their teams draft picks
looking for hidden gems and potential busts. Intuitively, early picks
in the draft have a much higher propensity to succeed in the NFL as we
showed last
week. What about the chance that a pick will be a
bust? It’s been well covered that,
out of the four times in NFL draft history a QB has been chosen 1 and
2, only once have both QBs been successful (1971: Jim Plunkett and
Archie Manning). We decided to expand the search and look at all picks
over the last 50 years and determine the average chance an NFL draft
pick will be a bust.

What is a “bust?” We'll look at it two
different ways. First, a bust is a player that ends up with
a value
score of less than 5 according
to pro-football-reference.com. A value of less than 5 is equivalent to a marginal role player that has
limited game experience and contributes little to no value to an NFL
franchise. Here it is in a visual:

You can see
from about round 6 (pick 160) and later, the percent chance of failing
on a draft pick is over 70%. With such a low hit rate, NFL teams
should focus their decision making on players that fit their current
schema and can be a strong contributor on special teams.

Now, with early round
picks, the expectation is a lot higher than just contributing on the
field. With a first or second round pick, an NFL team is expecting a
player that can come in, start, and contribute for years
to come. With that in mind, our second method for setting the bar for
a “bust” is that the player starts for less than one
year or plays less than 40 games in their career. Here's the same
visual with the different way of measuring busts:

A couple of interesting notes
from the graph. First, picking at the end of the second round only
gives your team a 50% chance of finding a starter. Going towards the
end of the round 3, your chance of finding a starter falls to
~30%. Using this criteria and our draft value chart from last week, let’s
evaluate a couple of the trades from Friday.

The Browns trading out of pick 67 to the Broncos for picks 87 and
120. The Browns increased their chance of getting a starter from 41%
to 49%. On a pick value basis, the Browns increased their pick value
from 259 to 299. All in all a fairly even trade for both sides but I
give the edge to the Browns.

What about the Cowboys and Rams trade in the first round? The
Cowboys traded away picks 14 and 45 for the 6th pick in the draft from
the Rams. From a “starter” perspective, the Cowboys
decreased their chance of picking a starter from 88% to 85%. From a
pick value perspective, the Cowboys decreased their value from 1141 to
779. From a stat point of view, looks like the Rams got the better of
the deal but once again a fairly even trade.

Another interesting note, in the later rounds, an NFL team has a
really slim chance of finding the next Tom Brady in round 6 or Donald
Driver in round 7. The data shows that finding a starter in round 6 or
7 is only 10 - 20%. Further strengthening the argument to search for
players that are effective on special teams in later rounds. Finally,
see pick 148 on the graph (highlighted in blue). In the past 50 years,
only two players picked 148 have started more than one year and played
in at least 40 games. Best of luck
to

Chris
Greenwood of the Detroit Lions, the 148th
selection of the 2012 draft. According to the data, you are the true
Mr. Irrelevant.